By limiting imports to two per quarter per team in 2012-13 for the first and third quarters, the bj-league is guaranteeing that the level of play and the flow of the game will be bordering on ridiculous.And also giving fans a great reason to have less interest in the game, and less reason to shell out cash to watch it.

Why should a coach have to run the show for the second and fourth quarters and, possibly, OT, with a different vital rule in place than the other 20 minutes of every contest?

At every possible point in time this much is certain: The bj-league finds ways (and not in a good way) to defy logic.

(This, after all, is a league that has never stopped expanding in a country with economic prosperity and 130 million people but a men's basketball national team that hasn't qualified for the Olympics since 1976, and the only way it can expect to do so in the next 20 years -- based on the incompetent leadership (zero flexibility, zero vision, zero common sense) at the highest levels of the Japan Basketball Association -- is to win the bid to host the 2020 Summer Games, which would give Japan automatic participation rights.)

But back to the bj-league ... No other pro league anywhere would consider this a sensible way of doing things.

The use of a synthetic sport court, too, puts this league at sub-standard levels compared to other pro leagues around the world. Everyone else plays on wood.

Nobody forced the bj-league to reduce its import quota to two per game for half the game. But that's what it has done.

Instead of having the number at three for the entire game, or two, this new, lame policy will dictate numbers that make no sense whatsoever.

"Japanese basketball is still in the stone age," someone told me recently. And he's right.

The JBL is just as stuck in its ways, what with no national draft (which dumbs down the process of new players making the jump to a paid gig after college), a one-import rule and a rigid structure that does little to attract new fans.

In essence, the JBL remains an old-boy network. Secret deals are made behind closed doors, and the rich companies have all the advantages without having to compete for talent in a legitimate way.

Or as one former coach in Japan stated a few years ago, describing the mind-set and inner workings of the Japan Basketball League:"The JBL is a gang."